Age of Empires 3 Review

The list of technical and design blunders goes on and on. When near caves or similar such environments, the units will switch to what can only be described as "bullet time" mode. The unit lag becomes horrific and it's almost impossible to move them across the map. Villagers can't repair buildings?!
The 1.01 patch fixes some of these issues, but certainly not all of them. It seems to me like this was simply an emergency patch to take care of some of the most glaring issues. I have installed it and played the patched version and *still* the path finding is bad. What's more, when you turn on anti-aliasing in any form (low or high), even in the patched game, the frame rate drops incredibly low and the unit lag gets far worse (I couldn't even run the game with high anti-aliasing on). Now, I've played AoE 3 on an NVIDIA 7800GT using the latest official NVIDIA drivers and if things are this bad on such a high-end card, I can only imagine how FSAA works on lower-end boards.

My enemies lie dead!

That's a nice pond there, skipper!

On the bright side, with the 1.01 patch applied, it gets far easier to enjoy the game, and really, the many qualities of the single-player campaign make it interesting and compelling to play.

Other positive sides of Age of Empires 3 include the absolutely stunning-looking 3D engine, as well as a fantastic musical score and sound effects (Another hallmark of any AOE game -Mo). This is quite simply the most beautiful sounding and looking RTS game I have ever played. I would spend a minute or two during each mission just marveling at the intricate landscapes and the sheer amount of work that went into designing each facet of the Age of Empires world.

My final verdict for Age of Empires 3 is that it's a game with great potential that sadly hasn't been fully developed. No matter how much you may like certain aspects of it, the fact that the retail code feels so incomplete and technically lacking is inexcusable. The pre-release patch only improves things slightly, and it looks to me like a more thorough patch is in order. For our reader, I would recommend that you wait a week or two before purchasing this one. In a few weeks, when the code feels more like retail code, I strongly advise you to get it - the experience will be worth it.